Trigger warning:

This site may, in fact always will contain images and information likely to cause consternation, conniptions, distress, along with moderate to severe bedwetting among statists, wimps, wusses, politicians, lefties, green fascists, and creatures of the state who can't bear the thought of anything that disagrees with their jaded view of the world.

Mar 20, 2013

For the
most divisive government in living memory, Gillard’s crowd has done a great job
in uniting the media. Talk of press control will do it every time.It is amazing to see the Labor shills
from Fairfax lining up beside News Ltd to campaign against the six media
control bills being rushed through parliament.

With the
benefit of newspeak, Finkelstein’s ‘super regulator’ has now become the more
innocuous sounding ‘Public Interest Media Advocate’ or PIMA, as the position
has become known.It is the same
animal, with the same powers to suppress dissent, but with a nicer sounding
name.

While the
term public interest has many great connotations of good to it along with
images of rainbows and unicorns; it has to be remembered that in the eyes of
government, ‘public interest’ has a remarkable tendency to coincide with the
interests of the ruling class.

Cartoonists
have produced some classics.

Nicholson has come up with a couple of beauties about
the effect of media control on his ilk.

Bill Leak offers up a more Soviet style concept of the future under PIMA

The Herald Sun pointed out that the ultimate media
regulator, is the public with its ability to vote for even handedness with its
dollar:

The world's
most famous newspaper - The Times - took years to recover from campaigning
throughout the 1930s for appeasement with Germany and Adolf Hitler.

When perhaps
hundreds of potential political opponents, including the Fuhrer's best mate,
Nazi leader Ernst Rohm, were executed on Hitler's orders, The Times insisted
that "Herr Hitler, whatever one may think of his methods, is genuinely
trying to transform revolutionary fervour in to moderate and constructive
effort and to impose a high standard of public service on National Socialist
officials."

That was
1934. Ouch.

The Times was
selling 204,400 copies a day then. The News Chronicle, a bitter critic of
appeasement, and calling for Britain to re-arm for the battle it knew lay
ahead, was selling 1,320,000 copies each day.

As always,
the audience was in the driver's seat.

It was
legendary editor C.P. Scott who coined the phrase "comment is free, but
facts are sacred", and newspaper editors have tried to live by it ever
since, knowing how keenly each is observed by their readers.